Ukraine's Failed Counteroffensive, Claremont: "The West Point of American Fascism", China's Influence in the Middle East, The Progressive Celts, "Ass Holes"
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Regarding Ukraine - I am not aware of any war that was won by staying continually on the defensive.
Russia will have to decide whether it has the stomach to do what it takes to actually win. Since the beginning, Russia has shown endless reluctance to do so, and has let its enemies off the hook on at least two occasions.
I think that the Russians are defining how this war will be fought to a conclusion and what "winning" it entails in a very different manner than Westerners can comprehend. They are not fighting a total war like the Second World War, not an expeditionary war of choice half a world away against "insurgents". What they are fighting is a war very similar to the 18th century "kabinettskreige" of limited, but sequential, warfare. That is a style of warfare no one in the United States has any experience or understanding of at the decision making or media propagandist levels, and certainly one the military does not comprehend either.
Russia is not dithering. Moscow is showing commendable caution and is prioritising its greatest asset (its soldiers) over a swift victory. Time is very much on Russia's side.
The West sees what you call "commendable caution" as contemptible weakness and consequently doubles down, ignoring Russian red line after red line as a result.
To start, let me state that I am not a qualified analyst, do not speak or read Russian and have not paid attention to the minutiae of the war.
My belief that Moscow is prioritising the lives of its men is based on the evidence of Putin's caution, his reluctance to support the Donbass insurgency directly and the manner on which the Russian's have declined to trade lives for land. The former are precious (Russia's greatest challenge is demography) while land can be taken and retaken easily enough and Russia has plenty start with. There is no evidence of substantial Russian casualties. In addition, the Russians have taken care not to expose their forces to enemy fire and are obviously very serious about defensive manouevres, strategic retreats (extraordinarily difficult to pull off successfully) and deployment under air cover.
As for the stuff out of Estonia...I am strongly disinclined to take anything out of the Baltic at face value. I know nothing about Dmitri but I'd be suspicious of any Russophone broadcasting anything that supported the NATO line. Have to admit my instinctive sympathies are with the Russians, Russophones and moderate (non-NATO) Ukrainians.
How representative any accurate information from Dmitri might be is impossible for me to say. I rely a lot on Colonel Douglas McGregor and Andrei Martyanov, both of whom strike me as reliable on every level. Also follow THE DURAN on youtube.
Russia's goals are evolving. At first it was simply to counter the NATO enabled Ukrainian assault on the Donbass in February 2022. Moscow assumed that Kiev would negotiate...which they did but the West vetoed the Istanbul peace deal.
Now that the war has revealed the limits of NATO logistics and the successful deterrence enabled by Russian air superiority Moscow has plenty of opportunities to pursue longer-term goals.
Russia merely has to wait a bit longer and see how the winter of 2023/24 goes for Europe. The costs of the war for Europe are escalating rapidly. The US has also lost a great deal of credibility internationally under Biden, especially in the Middle East and Africa.
Kabinettskreige is highly relevant here. US thinking on foreign policy and war appears incapable of comprehending what Russia is doing and is very poorly adapted for responding to it.
adhering to sun tzu russia delayed its offense until it presumed the west no longer dominant locally, and globally. before 2023, the usa May have been too strong, russia too weak.
if you think your enemy can go broke attacking you, using a bankrupt proxy 5 thousand miles to donate weapons you dig in and invite the declining waves to spend themselves.
sun tzu applies to the west much more than russia
as Napoleon observed ‘do not interferes with your enemy making his mistake”
Yet you appear to assume that Russia does somehow benefit.
But the real question is whether Russia will actually launch that expected offensive, when it is obvious that the Russian leadership really does not want this war, while the West is absolutely spoiling for a fight, especially one in which Americans aren't doing much of the dying.
The West can try to launch a guerilla war in Ukraine but it would never work If you look at successful insurgencies in recent decades, one thing they all have in common is a young population.
The median age in Yemen is some 19 year old. The median age in Ukraine was over 40, and that before the war. And importing Nazis from around the world assumes a lot of things, like Nazis that won't stand out like sore thumbs. There's a reason that locals fight guerilla wars.
As far as Russian leadership and dithering go - both are painfully obvious.
A guerilla war appeals to the fanatics in NATO who thrill to the memory of the CIA sponsored Nazi insurgency in the late '40s and early '50s.
Any guerilla war would cause utter mayhem across Eastern Central Europe and have explosive impacts on the politics of the wider region, including Germany. Even the local Russophobes can't be crazy enough to want to see the Visegrad bloc turn into anything resembling the Pakistani/Afghan borderlands...that level of lunacy is restricted to Washington, London and Ottawa.
Russia is sitting on Ukrainian territory. It wins by staying there. Much like the Germans in World War I in the West, Russia is facing an enemy that has to attack to restore the status quo. Ukraine can exhaust itself by continuing to attack Russian held territory, or Ukraine and its foreign supporters can try to find other ways to impose costs and harm on Russia. But the Russians are not obliged to launch a ground offensive, and they would probably be foolish to try.
So the argument is that Ukraine will be a larger and hotter version of the Vietnam War, if North Vietnam could occasionally make pinprick attacks on the US?
That's pretty much the desired outcome for the West.
I don't know what will happen. It could just congeal into a cease fire and no official peace, like Korea. It could escalate to a nuclear war. It could go down paths no one is currently thinking of. No idea. But an army sitting on enemy territory can sit there until it is pushed off, or until it's government gives up because of costs being imposed elsewhere. It may, or may not, make further ground attacks, to win.
You gotta wonder, during all this drama, what the f is the UN doing?
Oh yeah, rigged by veto powers of the security council that both players are a part of.
Will any sane person call out the scam of the UN?
Nah, let's just believe that nuclear war would happen... As if the criminals in charge would be cool with messing up the planet that they think they own.
It literally never entered my head to even think about the UN with regard to this conflict. Does anyone think about the UN?
To be fair, I have to say, looking back, the UN inspectors in Iraq before the 2003 war, were right about Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal. Hawkish right wingers, as I was at the time, didn’t believe it. We learned the hard way that the US regime lies to us. Some people paid for that education with their lives, or being maimed for life.
I am saddest of all for the Ukrainian troops being fed into the meat grinder. Zelensky cannot be anything less than ultra-hawkish, since he is not trusted by his own senior personnel. As a result his decision making is constrained. Further, his foreign sponsors apparently don't care how many Ukrainians get killed, so long as they are keeping the pressure on Russia, and he must keep them happy. There seems to be no scenario where the Ukrainians can dislodge the Russians from the territory they have already taken, at least not by the means currently available to the Ukrainians.
The recently failed counter-offensive looks like Kursk in 1943, with even German made "animal" tanks (Leopards rather than Tigers or Panthers this time) on the attacking side, and the same futile slog through mines and prepared defenses eating up the attacker's offensive power, with no coherent theory of victory, and no purpose to the attack other than attacking for its own sake.
Next up, waves of outdated (designed in the 1970s), unstealthy F-16s flown by under-trained Ukrainian pilots against a top notch air defense system. The massacre of patriotic Ukrainians will continue in the wild blue yonder.
They'll send a couple dozen F-16s which will get shot down/crash they'll blame lack of maintenance, operator error, and then upsell the F35's as the solution.
For the last few weeks it seems that Ukranians have been able to mask the approach of some of their jets from Russian AD. They may have confidence that this will work for F-16s but in my estimation the Russians will figure out a way to overcome this issue before then just as both sides have been able to outmaneuver each other's technical advantages in short order.
Zelenskii doesn't care what his own people think, nor need he care, as long as the army and secret police continue to follow orders and the West keeps pouring money in.
If Zelensky is perceived as weak he will be removed, probably dead. That is what he cares about. The people he cares about are not ordinary Ukrainians, but precisely the army and secret police, and other political factions, which have their own agendas.
Regarding the progressive Celtics article, the Irish referendums on abortion and same sex marriage both saw voters leaning significantly more progressive than government. Same can broadly be seen across all topics run through the Citizens Assembly of Ireland in recent years. I personally don't see his argument that elite progressives have captured Irish government in an unrepresentative way to be true (at least in the way he paints the picture).
The Irish political issues mentioned in his article (hate speech and transgender laws) may have been controversial internationally but neither captured public attention in any meaningful way domestically beyond fringe protest groups.
A better lens of "progressive vs conservative" in Ireland is the divide growing between agriculture and government / activist groups on climate policy, which has the potential to become the first real 21st Century populism movement in Irish politics (example: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/39224ff0-3ecc-11ee-bb14-4a4bb3eeebb7).
(1) Media coverage has been overwhelmingly international in origin, misleading most readers into thinking that their sentiment mirrors public sentiment here. If you do a quick Google search, you'll see that even the negative Irish coverage focuses almost exclusively on US-based opposition from people like Elon Musk. It has created very little interest domestically.
(2) The groups that did oppose it domestically were just the "always on" protest groups who oppose anything government led (migrants, lockdowns, vaccines, 5G, etc). Main voice here is the Irish Freedom Party, which has never won any election at any level and has a tiny membership base. There was no group that rose up organically to fight this cause, which is generally a sign that it has failed to capture any meaningful interest (large protests aren't entirely uncommon in Ireland, eg anti-austerity protests in 2010 drew 100,000+ people, pro-migrant march this past February had 50,000+ people). There wasn't a single notable protest against this hate speech law and it hasn't even passed yet, so now would be prime time for that. Political culture here is just nowhere near as fractured, polarized or "freedom"-focused as the US, and American coverage of this topic just seems to miss this point.
I don't know the veracity of it, but there was a video of a building in Dublin set to house migrants that the locals burned down before anyone got there. All of Eire might be turning into South Boston.
There's certainly been some anti-migrant groups (mostly anti-covid protest groups that pivoted towards that topic once the pandemic was over). While that is an issue, it still doesn't fit the mentioned article's argument that political elites lean significantly more liberal than the public and have "captured" the political apparatus for their own ideological pursuits -- as I pointed out, most recent examples of nationally-polled issues (referendums and Citizens' Assemblies) would point to the opposite.
National referendums and the Citizens Assembly are not the same as public opinion polls. We have multiple examples of national voting pushing more progressive than government appetite and no examples of the inverse. Why is there such a burden of proof in one direction? The arguments related to Ireland made by the author of the "Progressive Celts" post are not based in any referenceable fact (instead the opposite, multiple referenceable counterarguments). He's a UK-based author making assumptions about issues in political environment he does not understand.
What are you even talking about??? "Unverifiable assertions"? There's no question about voter validity in Irish referendums. Go read about either referendum instead:
"What about the cultural factors? This is what I am left asking after reading this article." I think Thomas Prosser does in fact give part of an answer - albeit in a rather oblique way - when he observes: "If voters know little about the record of Scottish and Welsh governments, instead concentrating on the Conservative government in Westminster, public scrutiny is limited." In other words the baseline of the political culture in the Celtic nations (more so in Scotland and Wales; less so in Ireland) has long been the visceral resentment of the English (or rather their caricature of the English) and a kind of romanticised self-pity. So devolved governments - however grossly self-absorbed and unrepresentative - can get a free ride simply by playing the 'English' card. To my mind, the worst part of all this is the way that the English establishment have always unwittingly encouraged this by endlessly romanticising Celticness at their own expense. I have written about that aspect of it in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/englishness-as-a-brand
There's another element too, as a rich white country full of transphobes and racists, the only way for celtic fringe identify out of our oppressor status is to be victims of cruel colonisation.
I hope it delights the naturalists who get to write about “ass holes” instead of some much more boring label for the phenomenon. Who says science can’t be fun?
I think there is a consensus among political elites in Western countries that superstructural cultural issues, such as gender politics/activism, are effective and proven ways to distract from worsening material conditions. It presents an unresolvable philosophical problem that strikes right at the heart of the liberal ideology, and one which fires up large swathes of the population - whilst directly effecting a minisucule number directly. The governing SNP party in Scotland, without their cultural agenda, is merely another corrupt, self-serving neoliberal party. Coupled with their claims to be the best hope for future Scottish independence, their cultural policies are what are keeping them in power.
Divide and conquer based on identity politics is a surefire way to keep people at each others throats over crumbs while the corruption and influence peddling of politics keeps the elites in the jet set.
I really laugh at what is considered "Far Right" by the chuds that set the Overton Window. Claremont? The Unz Review had about 8.5M pageviews and 2.7M visitors in July...that's about half the views and a third the visitors of National Review, gate keepers of the 'acceptable' right...
Fisted's comments on Ukraine are so ignorant as to be startling for someone who seems so smart.
The current Ukrainian counteroffensive is hardly a failure. Every day, and almost everywhere on the front, the Russians are in retreat. There are no big breakthroughs because the US has prevented the Ukrainians from achieving air superiority by not supplying F16s. And as we know, NATO doctrine is that air superiority is the precondition for defeating a seriously entrenched enemy. Instead, Ukrainians are having to do it the old fashioned and extremely bloody way, defensive line by defensive line – or maybe hedgerow by hedgerow, as in Normandy, which took the allies almost three months to get past. To say that D-Day failed eight weeks after the landings would have exceedingly stupid.
And anyway, war is not about terrain. It is about the ability to fight. And the Ukrainians have been methodically degrading the Russians ability to fight, interdicting logistics, killing soldiers in stunning numbers, demoralizing the army. That less obvious campaign will bear fruit in due time. Success will come gradually, and suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway.
Whether or not Ukraine is a project of the neocons does not make them in charge of anything. Ukrainians are not taking orders from the Americans, because first and foremost, they are now obviously fighting for their independence against long time oppressors, engineers of an historic genocide, and a current aggressor who is a tyrant, a successor to the KGB, and the leader of not so much a nation as a collection of gangsters. For the Russians, far from being a building success, the current battlefield slaughter is an accelerating catastrophe, for the Russian people, and for the leadership. A coup attempt in the middle of a war is hardly a sign of success.
But not only are the Ukrainians not taking orders from the US (the US had originally decided that Ukraine was lost, removed their embassy, and famously offered Zelensky transport out, to which he replied he wanted weapons instead), they are participating with their allies in the creation of the real post Cold War Europe, where the center of power is moving east from the decadent and sclerotic Western "powers" France and Germany to the clear-headed Central Europeans from the Baltics to the Mediterranean. The Baltic countries and Poland – and Ukraine – are calling the shots in this emerging Europe, and it's telling that the British have lined up to play their traditional game of opposing the French and the Germans in the 21st century by supporting other European powers, namely the Poles, Baltics, Scandinavians, Ukrainians and their other allies. If you haven't noticed, the Ukrainians and the Poles will have the largest and most powerful militaries in Europe (including Russia) by the end of the war, if they don't already have them now. In the case of the Ukrainians, they will be battle-hardened.
The real surprise of the war is the Europeans finally stepping up to fund and supply the Ukrainians. The Finns, the Swedes, the Baltics, the Poles, even the Italians, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc. are actually now offering meaningful support – which provides hope that there is a future NATO where US participation is cut down to size. Trumpists should be happy.
The other notable reality is that US policy remains mired on stupid. The puppeteers around Biden are playing a game which is too smart by half: supply the Ukrainians to bleed the Russians, but never give them as quickly or completely as possible what they really need to actually defeat the Russians and end the war. Instead, they prefer to retain leverage over Zelensky by withholding the long range strike capabilities which would cripple Russian logistics, and the planes it needs to take the skies from the Russians and be able to punch through their WWI defenses in the occupied East. And in so doing, they think they are so clever, thinking that allows them to offer Putin an offramp to ending the war before his regime collapses when the battlefield defeat finally comes (because a defeated Russia finally removes the need for US leadership of NATO?). Instead all they are doing is prolonging the war and the mischief that might allow, and demonstrating, once again, they are increasingly incompetent in managing the world.
The idea that Russia is invincible is simply a myth. Russian hasn't won a war since WWII, and that one only because the US armed them. They've been losing wars back to the first Crimea war in the 19th century that Tolstoy actually fought in. They lost the Russo-Japanese war. They lost WWI. The Russian elites lost the Russian Revolution. They lost the Afghan war. And, of course, they lost the Cold War. Continuing to assert that they are destined to win this war is, what? – sharing Putin's self-delusion that he has returned Russia to its position as a great power? But surely even he doesn't believe that anymore, because a great power doesn't get bogged down in war with a country that he thought he could conquer in three days. Indeed, what the Ukrainian war has demonstrated is that Russia's actual near peer is a country on the order of North Korea. By the end of the war, the Poles and the Ukrainians will have a military vastly more competent and powerful than Russia. Presaging the final collapse of the Russian empire?
It's time to reevaluate what's going on in Ukraine. It's a revolution against an imperial power. Other nations are using it to advance their own interests as they interpret them. But to think those other nations actually control Ukraine at this point – any more than the French controlled the Americans in their revolt against the British just because they provided support – is a profound mistake. Ukraine's European allies want nothing less than to permanently remove Russia as a threat (the heel of Russian occupation on their necks is too fresh and bitter a memory) and to build a new power center in Europe that puts the pusillanimous Western Europeans in their place. The real 21st century realignment of Europe started with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And by midcentury, the power structure of Europe will look more like the turn of the 20th century than the turn of the 21st, with a newly assertive Central Europe in charge.
F-16s are another super weapon game changer, which in parlance of this current war is to say nothing important. The territorial gains Ukraine has made in this offensive are basically meaningless except for a few minor and very local advantages. All the forces are now committed. Ukraine's warfighting capacity is quickly diminishing. All the territorial gains made in the south have been outdone by Russians in the north.
At this point the deaths of hundreds of thousands of more Ukrainians going forward is baked in due to the fact that they decided to pick on their much bigger neighbor and refused negotiations with realistic terms.
"...where the center of power is moving east from the decadent and sclerotic Western "powers" France and Germany to the clear-headed Central Europeans from the Baltics to the Mediterranean."
Your use of modifiers underscores your agenda.
Anyway, even the Poles have admitted that Muh Great Ukrainian Counteroffensive has failed. The New Hotness is that Ukraine needs more weapons for The Great Spring Offensive!
Interesting. We can find claims like this, which sound plausible, and then there are seemingly plausible claims that say the opposite. I get this two-track feed of inconsistent and contradictory analysis every day, from multiple sources. Very difficult to sort out spin from substance in this war. Time will (probably) tell.
Your cranked if you think any part of Europe will be able to escape American dominance without the support of a nearby great power(Russia being the only option).
I'd say A) Slim and B) None if my theory of Russian war aims are correct. In order to have a Uke government that will be acceptable to Ukranians and able to get out from a losing war, it will have to be a native, nationalist, Uke that topples the Jewish Comedian and his Kagan backers, not a Russian installed puppet. Think how Mussolini was toppled in 1943 as a close analogy.
As for occupying Western Ukraine, that is, as far as I know, not a Russian objective. It would be a poison pill and exactly what the US wants, which the Russians have been quite adept at not playing that game. Unlike the United States, Russia learned that lesson in Afghanistan. Endless Occupation of sullen foreigners is not how to play the game today.
The differences between Afghanistan and Ukraine are immense. Afghanistan had a rapidly growing population, Ukraine's is rapidly shrinking. Afghanistan was culturally and religiously foreign, the other nearly indistinguishable from Russia. One had perfect terrain for guerilla operations, the other is basically flat. Not to mention access to sea lanes, logistics, shared history and language, et cetera.
I can’t disagree with the Ukraine post except to say; It’s worse.
Combined arms means artillery and AIR. There’s no Ukraine air.
The Ukrainian and Western arms air defense shield is depleted.
Raytheon pulled people from retirement to reboot the Stinger line. (COBOL Anyone?).
This war was over in the Spring of 22 and it’s been $$$ and headcount $$$ since, war profiteering and the inability of the American Blob state to exert any administrative control once they start the snowball rolling downhill. << never mind events taking a life of their own.
Everything said about the time to train an army has been known since the Persian Empire (see Cyropedia by Xenophon) and the Romans took 4 years to build a Legion. A Legion was 4400 , the size of a US BCT/Brigade Combat Team.
To conduct a too long advertised offensive with artillery inferiority, in fact inferiority in all categories especially experienced troops and leaders with no air cover into very well prepared defenses against any enemy with far larger reserves may be one of the most criminal acts of military malpractice in history especially more than a year in.
You gotta love Foreign Affairs covering their ass they think by publishing the known training shortcomings the day the offensive starts.
They think; actually its a confession the day of the crime.
Enough with the stupid academic sociopaths in government.
Why? The slow game is working for the Russians. The same game they played in 2d Chechen War, Syria and for that matter the long struggle against the Mongols, aka Tartars. This is an economy of force effort for Russia.
^^^ I have been posting exactly that since last Summer ^^^ BTW.
Russia should conserve its forces and use no more than necessary and be in no hurry, for one thing that’s always good policy, for another they have to conserve force in case there’s some mad effort from US/NATO.
Finally the slow game has avoided escalation to nuclear war so far. Most consider that desirable.
Russia didn't pay a slow game at all in the Second Chechen War, Russian war efforts in Syria were constrained by logistics and a desire to avoid a direct confrontation with US/Turkish forces. We'll see whether this proves successful, since Syria remains occupied.
Meanwhile, the US continues to lavish more and longer-reaching arms on an enemy on Russia's border, when more force and resolve would have eliminated that enemy, permanently.
Nobody said Russia had to "throw it all" in, but a short, sharp and successful war that scared the West would be better than dithering and causing the West to smell blood.
It's not as if NATO has stopped talking about regime change. Quite the contrary.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 should be the pattern. Nobody in the West dared to more than the diplomatic equivalent of "thoughts and prayers".
Combined arms means artillery and AIR as well as infantry and armored maneuver after the engineers breached the obstacles... magically as hopelessly under resourced, and insanely delusional as the Russians would have crushed any penetration with a fraction of their artillery or the held back air.
This was a cosmetic offensive that killed thousands for Public Relations, to keep the $$$ going.
I took two weeks off. I needed it.
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Welcome back!
Regarding Ukraine - I am not aware of any war that was won by staying continually on the defensive.
Russia will have to decide whether it has the stomach to do what it takes to actually win. Since the beginning, Russia has shown endless reluctance to do so, and has let its enemies off the hook on at least two occasions.
I think that the Russians are defining how this war will be fought to a conclusion and what "winning" it entails in a very different manner than Westerners can comprehend. They are not fighting a total war like the Second World War, not an expeditionary war of choice half a world away against "insurgents". What they are fighting is a war very similar to the 18th century "kabinettskreige" of limited, but sequential, warfare. That is a style of warfare no one in the United States has any experience or understanding of at the decision making or media propagandist levels, and certainly one the military does not comprehend either.
This assumes a variety of facts not in evidence, although it would not be hard for the West to declare victory the longer Russia dithers.
Russia is not dithering. Moscow is showing commendable caution and is prioritising its greatest asset (its soldiers) over a swift victory. Time is very much on Russia's side.
The West sees what you call "commendable caution" as contemptible weakness and consequently doubles down, ignoring Russian red line after red line as a result.
Russia has more to worry about than just Ukraine.
Nobody said otherwise, and it's not as if those problems are going away.
Are the Russians worried that Washington will overreact and send NATO into the fight?
The consensus 'here' is that the US is fighting a propaganda war aimed at Europe. Ukraine and its sovereignty are expendable.
Russia is "prioritising its greatest asset (its soldiers)" ?
I read Dmitri's translated call intercepts and russian Telegram posts I get the opposite impression.
Philip do you think Dmitri's long library of russian conversation is fake or just unrepresentative of the big picture
https://twitter.com/wartranslated
To start, let me state that I am not a qualified analyst, do not speak or read Russian and have not paid attention to the minutiae of the war.
My belief that Moscow is prioritising the lives of its men is based on the evidence of Putin's caution, his reluctance to support the Donbass insurgency directly and the manner on which the Russian's have declined to trade lives for land. The former are precious (Russia's greatest challenge is demography) while land can be taken and retaken easily enough and Russia has plenty start with. There is no evidence of substantial Russian casualties. In addition, the Russians have taken care not to expose their forces to enemy fire and are obviously very serious about defensive manouevres, strategic retreats (extraordinarily difficult to pull off successfully) and deployment under air cover.
As for the stuff out of Estonia...I am strongly disinclined to take anything out of the Baltic at face value. I know nothing about Dmitri but I'd be suspicious of any Russophone broadcasting anything that supported the NATO line. Have to admit my instinctive sympathies are with the Russians, Russophones and moderate (non-NATO) Ukrainians.
How representative any accurate information from Dmitri might be is impossible for me to say. I rely a lot on Colonel Douglas McGregor and Andrei Martyanov, both of whom strike me as reliable on every level. Also follow THE DURAN on youtube.
Russia's goals are evolving. At first it was simply to counter the NATO enabled Ukrainian assault on the Donbass in February 2022. Moscow assumed that Kiev would negotiate...which they did but the West vetoed the Istanbul peace deal.
Now that the war has revealed the limits of NATO logistics and the successful deterrence enabled by Russian air superiority Moscow has plenty of opportunities to pursue longer-term goals.
Russia merely has to wait a bit longer and see how the winter of 2023/24 goes for Europe. The costs of the war for Europe are escalating rapidly. The US has also lost a great deal of credibility internationally under Biden, especially in the Middle East and Africa.
Kabinettskreige is highly relevant here. US thinking on foreign policy and war appears incapable of comprehending what Russia is doing and is very poorly adapted for responding to it.
What thinking and comprehending are they well adapted to Philip?
Have you read “This Town” by Mark Leibowitz? Meaning DC.
They understand DC, Philip.
It’s their entire world.
Think of the most Pompus Academic faculty ever meets The Boiler Room, or Wolf of Wall Street. That’s DC...
... actually DC is worse..
sun tzu said ‘no prince prospers from long war”
adhering to sun tzu russia delayed its offense until it presumed the west no longer dominant locally, and globally. before 2023, the usa May have been too strong, russia too weak.
if you think your enemy can go broke attacking you, using a bankrupt proxy 5 thousand miles to donate weapons you dig in and invite the declining waves to spend themselves.
sun tzu applies to the west much more than russia
as Napoleon observed ‘do not interferes with your enemy making his mistake”
translation cleaned up
"sun tzu said ‘no prince prospers from long war'”
Yet you appear to assume that Russia does somehow benefit.
But the real question is whether Russia will actually launch that expected offensive, when it is obvious that the Russian leadership really does not want this war, while the West is absolutely spoiling for a fight, especially one in which Americans aren't doing much of the dying.
i see no career to read 'leadership' minds.
stalin fought the banderists until 1949 those left over nazi fifth columnists, who assassinated field marshall vatutin in apr 1044.
why grab areas where nazis from around the world want to run a guerilla war?
long war hurts the local guy less than the hegemon from across the atlantic and west europe plain.
The West can try to launch a guerilla war in Ukraine but it would never work If you look at successful insurgencies in recent decades, one thing they all have in common is a young population.
The median age in Yemen is some 19 year old. The median age in Ukraine was over 40, and that before the war. And importing Nazis from around the world assumes a lot of things, like Nazis that won't stand out like sore thumbs. There's a reason that locals fight guerilla wars.
As far as Russian leadership and dithering go - both are painfully obvious.
A guerilla war appeals to the fanatics in NATO who thrill to the memory of the CIA sponsored Nazi insurgency in the late '40s and early '50s.
Any guerilla war would cause utter mayhem across Eastern Central Europe and have explosive impacts on the politics of the wider region, including Germany. Even the local Russophobes can't be crazy enough to want to see the Visegrad bloc turn into anything resembling the Pakistani/Afghan borderlands...that level of lunacy is restricted to Washington, London and Ottawa.
Of course such a war would cause mayhem. Nobody in Washington cares, although the local Russophobes are still practically drooling at the prospect.
Turn Eastern Europe into Badlands?
🤔
🤩 ok I’m in ... I’ll go flat brigand and bag me a pretty Polish Wife.
Civilian’s sucking anyway, I prosper and fester away anyway...
let me know, Maybe my friends are hiring...
Russia is sitting on Ukrainian territory. It wins by staying there. Much like the Germans in World War I in the West, Russia is facing an enemy that has to attack to restore the status quo. Ukraine can exhaust itself by continuing to attack Russian held territory, or Ukraine and its foreign supporters can try to find other ways to impose costs and harm on Russia. But the Russians are not obliged to launch a ground offensive, and they would probably be foolish to try.
So the argument is that Ukraine will be a larger and hotter version of the Vietnam War, if North Vietnam could occasionally make pinprick attacks on the US?
That's pretty much the desired outcome for the West.
I don't know what will happen. It could just congeal into a cease fire and no official peace, like Korea. It could escalate to a nuclear war. It could go down paths no one is currently thinking of. No idea. But an army sitting on enemy territory can sit there until it is pushed off, or until it's government gives up because of costs being imposed elsewhere. It may, or may not, make further ground attacks, to win.
Most of those scenarios will take little work for the West to call a Win.
Two reliable predictions. All the governments will claim they won, and all the dead people will stay dead.
And we were always at war with Eurasia err eastasia.... (mid stream change of target)
The West will call it a win even if the Russian flag is fluttering over Kiev. "We stopped Putin from conquering Europe"!!
The difference is that the claim of victory would ring much more hollow.
You gotta wonder, during all this drama, what the f is the UN doing?
Oh yeah, rigged by veto powers of the security council that both players are a part of.
Will any sane person call out the scam of the UN?
Nah, let's just believe that nuclear war would happen... As if the criminals in charge would be cool with messing up the planet that they think they own.
It literally never entered my head to even think about the UN with regard to this conflict. Does anyone think about the UN?
To be fair, I have to say, looking back, the UN inspectors in Iraq before the 2003 war, were right about Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal. Hawkish right wingers, as I was at the time, didn’t believe it. We learned the hard way that the US regime lies to us. Some people paid for that education with their lives, or being maimed for life.
Oh yeah, back then and also with Syria they were also correct initially...
So hmm, it was not until around those times when they started the hard clamp down with the group think...
It certainly can be when you outnumber the enemy and they charge at you like lemmings.
And it’s difficult to call Russia’s posture Defensive as they are on Ukrainian soil and not other way round-
It worked for the allies in WWI. For that matter, it worked in Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc..
Yeah it's almost like it's an act. Obviously people are hurt, displaced... But this "stalemate" is quite artificial.
They supposedly bombed the key electric infrastructure last year but we heard nothing...
Is this war much like the war in 1984? Is it designed to linger?
Funny too, the UN doesn't seem to have a job now... They forgot that it's supposed to be peace?
What a scam. But the people are seeing through the holes of cold war 2.0.
Guess I need to use alternative insults, as this takes the shine off the pejorative connotation for ass hole
Keep it in your gunbelt. Confusing a foe is a joy all it’s own.
I am saddest of all for the Ukrainian troops being fed into the meat grinder. Zelensky cannot be anything less than ultra-hawkish, since he is not trusted by his own senior personnel. As a result his decision making is constrained. Further, his foreign sponsors apparently don't care how many Ukrainians get killed, so long as they are keeping the pressure on Russia, and he must keep them happy. There seems to be no scenario where the Ukrainians can dislodge the Russians from the territory they have already taken, at least not by the means currently available to the Ukrainians.
The recently failed counter-offensive looks like Kursk in 1943, with even German made "animal" tanks (Leopards rather than Tigers or Panthers this time) on the attacking side, and the same futile slog through mines and prepared defenses eating up the attacker's offensive power, with no coherent theory of victory, and no purpose to the attack other than attacking for its own sake.
Next up, waves of outdated (designed in the 1970s), unstealthy F-16s flown by under-trained Ukrainian pilots against a top notch air defense system. The massacre of patriotic Ukrainians will continue in the wild blue yonder.
The entire thing is tragic.
f-16 from early adapter nato we’re delivered early 1980’s and those countries may not have kept them up to date.
they are being replaced by more unsupportable f-35.
if they were modern they would need a number of support aircraft to make a difference.
another’s headline is not combat capability
They'll send a couple dozen F-16s which will get shot down/crash they'll blame lack of maintenance, operator error, and then upsell the F35's as the solution.
For the last few weeks it seems that Ukranians have been able to mask the approach of some of their jets from Russian AD. They may have confidence that this will work for F-16s but in my estimation the Russians will figure out a way to overcome this issue before then just as both sides have been able to outmaneuver each other's technical advantages in short order.
Zelenskii doesn't care what his own people think, nor need he care, as long as the army and secret police continue to follow orders and the West keeps pouring money in.
If Zelensky is perceived as weak he will be removed, probably dead. That is what he cares about. The people he cares about are not ordinary Ukrainians, but precisely the army and secret police, and other political factions, which have their own agendas.
Nobody in the West or even Kiev cares in the least.
This is a gross injustice to Kursk.
In fact this offensive is obscene, there’s no WW1 tale to match it.
This is the most evil offensive in history
No air
Air defense depleted
Running out of everything
Half trained
25% of the now depleted breach engineering assets
Inferior artillery
Not enough ammo
Most of the men dead or fled.
This is pure war profiteering now.
There’s no WW1 story to match this, not even the Italians charging up mountains into prepared Austrian positions.
That was a slaughter but they took more than is taken in Ukraine.
I think Zelensky and Foggy Bottom have decided to literally fight to the last Ukrainian man.
If you want to argue that this is way stupider than Kursk, I’m not going to disagree with you.
Regarding the progressive Celtics article, the Irish referendums on abortion and same sex marriage both saw voters leaning significantly more progressive than government. Same can broadly be seen across all topics run through the Citizens Assembly of Ireland in recent years. I personally don't see his argument that elite progressives have captured Irish government in an unrepresentative way to be true (at least in the way he paints the picture).
The Irish political issues mentioned in his article (hate speech and transgender laws) may have been controversial internationally but neither captured public attention in any meaningful way domestically beyond fringe protest groups.
A better lens of "progressive vs conservative" in Ireland is the divide growing between agriculture and government / activist groups on climate policy, which has the potential to become the first real 21st Century populism movement in Irish politics (example: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/39224ff0-3ecc-11ee-bb14-4a4bb3eeebb7).
Two main reasons that I would say:
(1) Media coverage has been overwhelmingly international in origin, misleading most readers into thinking that their sentiment mirrors public sentiment here. If you do a quick Google search, you'll see that even the negative Irish coverage focuses almost exclusively on US-based opposition from people like Elon Musk. It has created very little interest domestically.
(2) The groups that did oppose it domestically were just the "always on" protest groups who oppose anything government led (migrants, lockdowns, vaccines, 5G, etc). Main voice here is the Irish Freedom Party, which has never won any election at any level and has a tiny membership base. There was no group that rose up organically to fight this cause, which is generally a sign that it has failed to capture any meaningful interest (large protests aren't entirely uncommon in Ireland, eg anti-austerity protests in 2010 drew 100,000+ people, pro-migrant march this past February had 50,000+ people). There wasn't a single notable protest against this hate speech law and it hasn't even passed yet, so now would be prime time for that. Political culture here is just nowhere near as fractured, polarized or "freedom"-focused as the US, and American coverage of this topic just seems to miss this point.
I don't know the veracity of it, but there was a video of a building in Dublin set to house migrants that the locals burned down before anyone got there. All of Eire might be turning into South Boston.
There's certainly been some anti-migrant groups (mostly anti-covid protest groups that pivoted towards that topic once the pandemic was over). While that is an issue, it still doesn't fit the mentioned article's argument that political elites lean significantly more liberal than the public and have "captured" the political apparatus for their own ideological pursuits -- as I pointed out, most recent examples of nationally-polled issues (referendums and Citizens' Assemblies) would point to the opposite.
Polling is a dubious argument though. If the political apparatus were truly captured, pollsters could be expected to support the effort.
National referendums and the Citizens Assembly are not the same as public opinion polls. We have multiple examples of national voting pushing more progressive than government appetite and no examples of the inverse. Why is there such a burden of proof in one direction? The arguments related to Ireland made by the author of the "Progressive Celts" post are not based in any referenceable fact (instead the opposite, multiple referenceable counterarguments). He's a UK-based author making assumptions about issues in political environment he does not understand.
Lots of unverifiable assertions are flying around. Some kind of ballot traceability for voters would help.
What are you even talking about??? "Unverifiable assertions"? There's no question about voter validity in Irish referendums. Go read about either referendum instead:
[1] 34th Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-fourth_Amendment_of_the_Constitution_of_Ireland
[2] 36th Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-sixth_Amendment_of_the_Constitution_of_Ireland
Thanks for the illuminating post, Daniel.
"What about the cultural factors? This is what I am left asking after reading this article." I think Thomas Prosser does in fact give part of an answer - albeit in a rather oblique way - when he observes: "If voters know little about the record of Scottish and Welsh governments, instead concentrating on the Conservative government in Westminster, public scrutiny is limited." In other words the baseline of the political culture in the Celtic nations (more so in Scotland and Wales; less so in Ireland) has long been the visceral resentment of the English (or rather their caricature of the English) and a kind of romanticised self-pity. So devolved governments - however grossly self-absorbed and unrepresentative - can get a free ride simply by playing the 'English' card. To my mind, the worst part of all this is the way that the English establishment have always unwittingly encouraged this by endlessly romanticising Celticness at their own expense. I have written about that aspect of it in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/englishness-as-a-brand
Thank you, Graham!
And thank you for the 'like' on Englishness as a Brand.....could Slouching Towards Bethlehem be your Substack read no.177?
There's another element too, as a rich white country full of transphobes and racists, the only way for celtic fringe identify out of our oppressor status is to be victims of cruel colonisation.
I hope it delights the naturalists who get to write about “ass holes” instead of some much more boring label for the phenomenon. Who says science can’t be fun?
I think there is a consensus among political elites in Western countries that superstructural cultural issues, such as gender politics/activism, are effective and proven ways to distract from worsening material conditions. It presents an unresolvable philosophical problem that strikes right at the heart of the liberal ideology, and one which fires up large swathes of the population - whilst directly effecting a minisucule number directly. The governing SNP party in Scotland, without their cultural agenda, is merely another corrupt, self-serving neoliberal party. Coupled with their claims to be the best hope for future Scottish independence, their cultural policies are what are keeping them in power.
Divide and conquer based on identity politics is a surefire way to keep people at each others throats over crumbs while the corruption and influence peddling of politics keeps the elites in the jet set.
It is noteworthy that the national-conservative revolution happened also in a small country, Hungary.
Hungary understands Progressive politics, all must learn the Hard Way. Tech flees SF to...
.... spread the poison.
I really laugh at what is considered "Far Right" by the chuds that set the Overton Window. Claremont? The Unz Review had about 8.5M pageviews and 2.7M visitors in July...that's about half the views and a third the visitors of National Review, gate keepers of the 'acceptable' right...
You don't think the Lincoln Project and Bill Kristol have their fingers on the pulse of the Right???? : )
Curious how much is driven by Steve Sailer. One of the only things I check for daily
Fisted's comments on Ukraine are so ignorant as to be startling for someone who seems so smart.
The current Ukrainian counteroffensive is hardly a failure. Every day, and almost everywhere on the front, the Russians are in retreat. There are no big breakthroughs because the US has prevented the Ukrainians from achieving air superiority by not supplying F16s. And as we know, NATO doctrine is that air superiority is the precondition for defeating a seriously entrenched enemy. Instead, Ukrainians are having to do it the old fashioned and extremely bloody way, defensive line by defensive line – or maybe hedgerow by hedgerow, as in Normandy, which took the allies almost three months to get past. To say that D-Day failed eight weeks after the landings would have exceedingly stupid.
And anyway, war is not about terrain. It is about the ability to fight. And the Ukrainians have been methodically degrading the Russians ability to fight, interdicting logistics, killing soldiers in stunning numbers, demoralizing the army. That less obvious campaign will bear fruit in due time. Success will come gradually, and suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway.
Whether or not Ukraine is a project of the neocons does not make them in charge of anything. Ukrainians are not taking orders from the Americans, because first and foremost, they are now obviously fighting for their independence against long time oppressors, engineers of an historic genocide, and a current aggressor who is a tyrant, a successor to the KGB, and the leader of not so much a nation as a collection of gangsters. For the Russians, far from being a building success, the current battlefield slaughter is an accelerating catastrophe, for the Russian people, and for the leadership. A coup attempt in the middle of a war is hardly a sign of success.
But not only are the Ukrainians not taking orders from the US (the US had originally decided that Ukraine was lost, removed their embassy, and famously offered Zelensky transport out, to which he replied he wanted weapons instead), they are participating with their allies in the creation of the real post Cold War Europe, where the center of power is moving east from the decadent and sclerotic Western "powers" France and Germany to the clear-headed Central Europeans from the Baltics to the Mediterranean. The Baltic countries and Poland – and Ukraine – are calling the shots in this emerging Europe, and it's telling that the British have lined up to play their traditional game of opposing the French and the Germans in the 21st century by supporting other European powers, namely the Poles, Baltics, Scandinavians, Ukrainians and their other allies. If you haven't noticed, the Ukrainians and the Poles will have the largest and most powerful militaries in Europe (including Russia) by the end of the war, if they don't already have them now. In the case of the Ukrainians, they will be battle-hardened.
The real surprise of the war is the Europeans finally stepping up to fund and supply the Ukrainians. The Finns, the Swedes, the Baltics, the Poles, even the Italians, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc. are actually now offering meaningful support – which provides hope that there is a future NATO where US participation is cut down to size. Trumpists should be happy.
The other notable reality is that US policy remains mired on stupid. The puppeteers around Biden are playing a game which is too smart by half: supply the Ukrainians to bleed the Russians, but never give them as quickly or completely as possible what they really need to actually defeat the Russians and end the war. Instead, they prefer to retain leverage over Zelensky by withholding the long range strike capabilities which would cripple Russian logistics, and the planes it needs to take the skies from the Russians and be able to punch through their WWI defenses in the occupied East. And in so doing, they think they are so clever, thinking that allows them to offer Putin an offramp to ending the war before his regime collapses when the battlefield defeat finally comes (because a defeated Russia finally removes the need for US leadership of NATO?). Instead all they are doing is prolonging the war and the mischief that might allow, and demonstrating, once again, they are increasingly incompetent in managing the world.
The idea that Russia is invincible is simply a myth. Russian hasn't won a war since WWII, and that one only because the US armed them. They've been losing wars back to the first Crimea war in the 19th century that Tolstoy actually fought in. They lost the Russo-Japanese war. They lost WWI. The Russian elites lost the Russian Revolution. They lost the Afghan war. And, of course, they lost the Cold War. Continuing to assert that they are destined to win this war is, what? – sharing Putin's self-delusion that he has returned Russia to its position as a great power? But surely even he doesn't believe that anymore, because a great power doesn't get bogged down in war with a country that he thought he could conquer in three days. Indeed, what the Ukrainian war has demonstrated is that Russia's actual near peer is a country on the order of North Korea. By the end of the war, the Poles and the Ukrainians will have a military vastly more competent and powerful than Russia. Presaging the final collapse of the Russian empire?
It's time to reevaluate what's going on in Ukraine. It's a revolution against an imperial power. Other nations are using it to advance their own interests as they interpret them. But to think those other nations actually control Ukraine at this point – any more than the French controlled the Americans in their revolt against the British just because they provided support – is a profound mistake. Ukraine's European allies want nothing less than to permanently remove Russia as a threat (the heel of Russian occupation on their necks is too fresh and bitter a memory) and to build a new power center in Europe that puts the pusillanimous Western Europeans in their place. The real 21st century realignment of Europe started with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And by midcentury, the power structure of Europe will look more like the turn of the 20th century than the turn of the 21st, with a newly assertive Central Europe in charge.
F-16s are another super weapon game changer, which in parlance of this current war is to say nothing important. The territorial gains Ukraine has made in this offensive are basically meaningless except for a few minor and very local advantages. All the forces are now committed. Ukraine's warfighting capacity is quickly diminishing. All the territorial gains made in the south have been outdone by Russians in the north.
At this point the deaths of hundreds of thousands of more Ukrainians going forward is baked in due to the fact that they decided to pick on their much bigger neighbor and refused negotiations with realistic terms.
"...where the center of power is moving east from the decadent and sclerotic Western "powers" France and Germany to the clear-headed Central Europeans from the Baltics to the Mediterranean."
Your use of modifiers underscores your agenda.
Anyway, even the Poles have admitted that Muh Great Ukrainian Counteroffensive has failed. The New Hotness is that Ukraine needs more weapons for The Great Spring Offensive!
Interesting. We can find claims like this, which sound plausible, and then there are seemingly plausible claims that say the opposite. I get this two-track feed of inconsistent and contradictory analysis every day, from multiple sources. Very difficult to sort out spin from substance in this war. Time will (probably) tell.
it took Rommel under guderian 10 days from crossing the Meuse to bottling up the french north armee , and British in dunkirk.
long offensives that get mined to death, blame weeds, and training defects are not successes
Your cranked if you think any part of Europe will be able to escape American dominance without the support of a nearby great power(Russia being the only option).
Central Europe is committing suicide due to collapsing birthrates, and is in no position to be in charge.
I wonder what this post reads like in the original German.
Oh, wait.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_Stalingrad_Speech
The number of Russian fighting age men is greater than the entire population of Ukraine. You are deluded.
No. Sorry.
No nukes.
No babies.
No Navy.
Nowhere to go.
Thanks for the second Saturday, this Croatian Calendar should be the standard.
What is the likelihood of Russia being provoked into a) toppling the Ukrainian government and/or b) occupying Western Ukraine?
I'd say A) Slim and B) None if my theory of Russian war aims are correct. In order to have a Uke government that will be acceptable to Ukranians and able to get out from a losing war, it will have to be a native, nationalist, Uke that topples the Jewish Comedian and his Kagan backers, not a Russian installed puppet. Think how Mussolini was toppled in 1943 as a close analogy.
As for occupying Western Ukraine, that is, as far as I know, not a Russian objective. It would be a poison pill and exactly what the US wants, which the Russians have been quite adept at not playing that game. Unlike the United States, Russia learned that lesson in Afghanistan. Endless Occupation of sullen foreigners is not how to play the game today.
The differences between Afghanistan and Ukraine are immense. Afghanistan had a rapidly growing population, Ukraine's is rapidly shrinking. Afghanistan was culturally and religiously foreign, the other nearly indistinguishable from Russia. One had perfect terrain for guerilla operations, the other is basically flat. Not to mention access to sea lanes, logistics, shared history and language, et cetera.
A few months ago I would have said close to zero but now that the UFA is just about out of gas, why not?
Many thanks for the mention :-)
My pleasure!
I can’t disagree with the Ukraine post except to say; It’s worse.
Combined arms means artillery and AIR. There’s no Ukraine air.
The Ukrainian and Western arms air defense shield is depleted.
Raytheon pulled people from retirement to reboot the Stinger line. (COBOL Anyone?).
This war was over in the Spring of 22 and it’s been $$$ and headcount $$$ since, war profiteering and the inability of the American Blob state to exert any administrative control once they start the snowball rolling downhill. << never mind events taking a life of their own.
Everything said about the time to train an army has been known since the Persian Empire (see Cyropedia by Xenophon) and the Romans took 4 years to build a Legion. A Legion was 4400 , the size of a US BCT/Brigade Combat Team.
To conduct a too long advertised offensive with artillery inferiority, in fact inferiority in all categories especially experienced troops and leaders with no air cover into very well prepared defenses against any enemy with far larger reserves may be one of the most criminal acts of military malpractice in history especially more than a year in.
You gotta love Foreign Affairs covering their ass they think by publishing the known training shortcomings the day the offensive starts.
They think; actually its a confession the day of the crime.
Enough with the stupid academic sociopaths in government.
Can we please have a better class of criminals?
I know some guys...
*IF* Ukraine is truly depleted, then Russia needs to stop dithering, rather than give one's enemies plenty of time to rearm and regroup.
Why? The slow game is working for the Russians. The same game they played in 2d Chechen War, Syria and for that matter the long struggle against the Mongols, aka Tartars. This is an economy of force effort for Russia.
^^^ I have been posting exactly that since last Summer ^^^ BTW.
Russia should conserve its forces and use no more than necessary and be in no hurry, for one thing that’s always good policy, for another they have to conserve force in case there’s some mad effort from US/NATO.
Finally the slow game has avoided escalation to nuclear war so far. Most consider that desirable.
Russia didn't pay a slow game at all in the Second Chechen War, Russian war efforts in Syria were constrained by logistics and a desire to avoid a direct confrontation with US/Turkish forces. We'll see whether this proves successful, since Syria remains occupied.
Meanwhile, the US continues to lavish more and longer-reaching arms on an enemy on Russia's border, when more force and resolve would have eliminated that enemy, permanently.
Very well. And the other matters I mentioned?
Like RU throwing it all into Ukraine and then getting caught short if “NATO” marches?
The same “NATO” that trumpets regime change in Moscow?
The other major matter being Nuclear War if the conflict escalates out of control, thereby making escalation undesirable?
Nobody said Russia had to "throw it all" in, but a short, sharp and successful war that scared the West would be better than dithering and causing the West to smell blood.
It's not as if NATO has stopped talking about regime change. Quite the contrary.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 should be the pattern. Nobody in the West dared to more than the diplomatic equivalent of "thoughts and prayers".
I'm going to disagree that the Russians aren't playing their classic slow game and leave it there on the slow game.
In 1968 the Russians weren't dealing with a Carmilla of madmen wheeling around a dementia patient, with a bitter woman as the replacement [Kamala].
In 1968 everyone knew what war was.
These people's only knowledge of war is profit, safety, the tingles of power, gleefully grinding the helpless under their high heels.
fortran was used in some systems to do math……
doing modern language would bring the old sw engineers out of long retirement…. to explain the math and physics to the kids.
the Brit’s had a hell of a time holding the us army back from doing d day in 1942!
Math? Is there an app that does math?
Combined arms means artillery and AIR as well as infantry and armored maneuver after the engineers breached the obstacles... magically as hopelessly under resourced, and insanely delusional as the Russians would have crushed any penetration with a fraction of their artillery or the held back air.
This was a cosmetic offensive that killed thousands for Public Relations, to keep the $$$ going.
The sinister thing is the integration of strategy and entertainment/PR by NATO. Chilling on any number of levels. No wonder enlistment is in crisis.
Well the Western WarMongers INC.llc.gov.edu. are Insane Sir, so it makes sense to them...